Five Things – 03.14.15 – Square, Rectangle, Trapezoid, Tetrazoid!

System Technology

It’s a really dry title and if we’re being honest, a really dry delivery. BUT! If you squint a little bit at this early 1960s informational film by the Systems Development Corporation you’ll find a lot to love beyond the subject matter.

If you’re into the step by step development process for early warning systems for aircraft you’ll already be on board. But let’s assume you aren’t. The film benefits from the inescapable fact that the camera was pointing at things happening in the ’60s. More specifically, it’s pointed at men and women who are wearing clothes and using machines that existed in the 1960s.

The subject is interesting, but the structure of the film just isn’t. Using a man-from-the-future perspective it’s noteworthy just how much of this process is probably truncated and made vastly more efficient today. The hand tools and bulky machines used are fantastic in their ubiquity as well as their design.

The film oddly cuts into animated segments that look like lifts from a Roald Dahl book.

And there’s a strange bit toward the end about computers replacing teachers in a 1:1 classroom setting.

If you’re going to name a project “The Leviathan Project”, your first step really needs to be to make sure it’s an interesting project.

All-in-all, worth the watch. Not for what it’s about, but what it does while it’s being about what it’s about. Here it is.

Tenspeed and Brown Shoe

This 1980 one-season detective show featured stage veteran Ben Vereen (also Wil Smith’s father on Fresh Prince of Bel-Air!) playing a hustler-turned-detective and an up-and-coming nobody named Jeff Goldbum playing his partner, a straight-laced accountant-turned-detecive who was a Black Belt in Karate. That kind of feels like putting too many spices in the soup.

Regardless, it gave us intros like this…

…and newspaper/TV Guide ads like this…

…and for that, I’m thankful.

1910 Beijing

This is easily the most beautiful thing I’ve seen this week. I could watch this over and over again.

Tetris Commercial

It’s easy to forget or overlook the stranglehold that Tetris had on the American public in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This commercial ran in pretty much every break on kid’s TV back then. It tries way too hard!

Practical Taxidermy

I love this beautiful 19th-century cover for a book called Practical Taxidermy. I wonder if impractical taxidermy got a similarly ornate treatment.